Currently, there is a widespread increase in the storage and maintenance of electronic content. Electronic content can include structured or unstructured content, such as text files, images, and emails, as well as other types of documents. In a collaborative environment, electronic content can be centrally stored and accessed by multiple users for reference, modification, or analysis. Further, the users can add content to the collaborative environment for sharing with other users, which causes an influx of electronic content within the environment. Additionally, the collaborative environment is constantly changing due to the addition, modification, and deletion of electronic content.
The constantly changing nature of a collaborative environment can hinder or make difficult, content searches. For, example, accurate and consistent search results are necessary during the discovery portion of litigation to identify documents potentially relevant to the underlying legal matter for review, which can potentially affect the outcome of the underlying legal matter. However, as the number of electronic documents to be searched increases, the time for conducting the search also increases, while the search accuracy decreases.
Products, such as Microsoft SharePoint, licensed by Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Wash. provide a collaborative user environment with search functionality and access control. Yet, particular versions of the SharePoint search tools can be inadequate for providing efficient, accurate, and consistent results during the discovery phase of litigation due to the complex security, dynamic nature of the environment, and inconsistent indexing of the electronic documents.
Attempts have been made to accurately obtain documents from within SharePoint. For example, Stored IQ, Kazeon, Autonomy, and AvePoint all conduct document searches in SharePoint using a keyword query. Stored IQ, Autonomy, and Kazeon generate external indexes by reindexing all the documents in SharePoint, while AvePoint solely relies on the index of SharePoint. Keywords are then applied to the SharePoint index or newly generated index to identify stored electronic documents that contain the keywords and phrases. However, keyword searches can be inaccurate and untimely. To perform a keyword search, search terms must first be identified, which can be time consuming and delay the document search. In addition, the results of keyword searches need to be evaluated and tested to validate the use of those particular keywords.
Thus, there remains a need for a system and method for accurately and timely conducting a document search by custodian within a collaboration platform having stored electronic documents and preserving the identified documents.